Smith-9th Street getting some attention and runway moment from the NYT.

"But for now, and perhaps for a limited time only, the Smith-Ninth Street station high above the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn,recently reopened beneficiaryof a two-year-long, $32 million renovation project, is the mass-transit portal of many New Yorkers' dreams.

So if you want to experience a fresh, pristine New York City subway station – before the tracks become covered with brake dust, trash and rat prints, and the walls and windows defaced by man and nature – you'd better get on it."

Friday, May 24, 2013

"After theGreat GoogsMooga food fest, "Nethermead meadow is in severe distress and is in far worse condition than it was left in from the fiasco last year," parks advocate Anne-Katrin Titze told Brooklyn Magazine.

Sections of the Nethermead will be off limits for most of the summer while the meadow is reseeded."

This is the sort of event that should be taking place down at the Red Hook cruise ship terminal.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The New York Times profiles the next mayor of New York, Bill deBlasio:

"Mr. de Blasio likens Mr. Bloomberg, in approach if not results, to Robert Moses, and has amassed a running tally of the indignities and inequities in four boroughs: a yawning income gap, a surge in fines for small businesses, slighted schools and inadequate early childhood education.

He envisions an activist city government that addresses those disparities head on. Alone among the Democratic field, he calls for a tax increase on the rich, to bankroll universal prekindergarten."

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Article on lighting effects of the Oculus at the forthcoming Fulton
Street Transit Center.

"Central to this effort is an entry and retail pavilion containing an
eight-story dome capped with a glass oculus. The dome's interior
surface is lined with a cable net whose nearly 1,000 anodized aluminum
panels redirect sunlight into the subway system below.The cable net
and cladding system was based on a concept by James Carpenter Design
Associates."

Sent to you via Google Reader

According to the Smithsonian Institution researcher Gary Hevel, one trillion cicadas—a giant insect the size of a human finger—are about to take over the East Coast. Some had said it would be a mere 30 billion, which were already enough bugs to go to the moon and back. How gross this could be? University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp says "there will be some places where it's wall-to-wall cicadas." [io9]

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Something tells me 99% of the cretins who screamed about Obama's birth
certificate will have no problem with Ted Cruz. Funny how that works.

"Cruz isn't worried that his birth certificate will be a problem.
Though he was born in Canada, he and his advisers are confident that
they could win any legal battle over his eligibility. Cruz's mother
was a U.S. citizen when he was born, and he considers himself to be a
natural-born citizen."